Author Archives: natalie

Mommy Wars?

Posted on by

I hope it’s not too late for me to weigh in on the Hilary Rosen/Ann Romney flap, even though it’s long since been superseded in the media by the GSA conference scandal and the Secret Service prostitution brouhaha.

Of course it’s not too late, says my indulgent editor, who (given that this is my blog) happens to be me. (Ah, the pleasures of being one’s own boss!)

In my view, the Rosen/Romney flap has been blown way out of proportion. It’s pretty clear that Rosen didn’t mean to say that stay-at-home moms in general don’t do any work—her point was that Romney comes from an extremely privileged milieu and hasn’t had to worry about economic pressures, unlike most women out there. But the Romney campaign mined Rosen’s (admittedly poorly chosen) words for political advantage, and the Obama camp, fearful of losing its gender gap advantage, ran like hell to distance itself from them.

Leaving aside the questionable assumption in Rosen’s remark that people who are wealthy can’t empathize with people who are struggling economically, what’s interesting to me about the flap is the light it sheds (if any) on what have been called the Mommy Wars. That term refers to the supposed tensions between mothers who work outside the home and those who don’t.

As someone who worked part-time while her children were young, I feel I’ve straddled both worlds. Perhaps that position insulated me from those tensions, but frankly, I never really felt them, at least not from other mothers. What I did feel was a lot of internal tension—and guilt, self-doubt, and anxiety. It was my own personal Mommy War, fought against myself.

When my kids were very young and protested violently when I left the house for work (or pretty much any other reason), I questioned whether I was doing the right thing. What was so important about my job, I asked myself, that I should put my child through this misery? Wasn’t I being selfish? (Of course, my kids’ misery probably evaporated a mere 5 minutes after I was out of sight. Still, the fact remains that I sometimes felt guilty for working, even 20 hours a week.)

And while there were many precious moments that I will always treasure on the days I was home with my kids, there were also a number of moments when I was in serious fear for my mental health. I was often glad I was there to answer my kids’ questions and resolve their spats, but there were also days when I wondered whether folding laundry and cleaning up spilled juice was really the best use of my fancy-shmancy degrees. And although I treasured the part-time job I was lucky enough to find, it wasn’t the kind of job that was going to impress anyone at a DC dinner party. Those jobs generally require 80 hours a week rather than 20.

Some days I felt I had the best of both worlds. Other days I felt I’d failed all around: I wasn’t doing such a great job as a mom, and I’d screwed up whatever chance I had for a meaningful career.

So I think I can empathize to some extent with both mommy camps. And when I was writing my novel, The Mother Daughter Show, it occurred to me that I had two characters—one a stay-at-home mom, the other a fairly high-powered stay-at-work one—who were friends. Wouldn’t it be interesting, I thought, to externalize the feelings that had swirled within me during my kids’ childhood and adolescence, giving one set to one character and the rest to the other?

It was. And it also showed me that my Mommy War wasn’t quite as internal as I’d thought. Hadn’t I, like my character Amanda, envied the moms with high-powered careers because their work was so clearly valued by society, whereas mine was not? And hadn’t I sometimes wondered, like my character Susan, what the full-time stay-at-home moms did all day long, especially once their kids got older and less time-consuming?

As with so much in fiction, what I did was take something (in this case, my conflicted feelings about working outside the home versus staying there) and blow it way up. My characters Susan and Amanda find their close friendship falling apart, partly because of the eruption of these latent tensions about their different child-rearing choices. In real life, I’ve had friendships both with mothers who have worked full-time and with those who’ve stayed home—and I’ve seen other women maintain friendships across these lines—without any such tensions erupting.

Of course, that doesn’t mean those tensions aren’t there. If remarks like Rosen’s touch a nerve, it’s because many stay-at-home mothers probably suffer from the same self-doubt I did about the value of what they’re doing, whether they admit it or not. It’s hard not to, when you’re putting in long, hard days and not getting paid for them.

And if Ann Romney had shot back with a remark criticizing working mothers like Rosen for abandoning their kids to pursue their own ambitions, you can bet that would have touched a nerve too, for the same reason. No doubt many working mothers suffer from some degree of guilt about not spending more time with their kids. And because other people’s choices about how to raise their kids often feel like implicit criticisms of our own (for an interesting look at that, see today’s New York Times Styles Section), we tend to get defensive when questions of child-rearing are involved.

But, as my characters Susan and Amanda eventually realize, what we have in common as mothers, and women, are usually more important than things like whether we work outside the home or not. In the vast majority of cases there’s no right or wrong here, just different strokes for different folks. I suspect most women—indeed, most people—would say they agree with that point of view these days. But that sort of subtlety makes for much less entertaining media fodder—and, to be honest, novelistic fodder—than something we can label “Mommy Wars.”

Facts and Fiction

Posted on by

It seems that every few months—or sometimes every few weeks—a new scandal arises involving some “nonfiction” writer who has played fast and loose with the facts.

Most recently we had the story of Mike Daisey—the monologuist of “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” who was discovered to have stretched the truth about abuses he witnessed while visiting a Chinese factory that produces iPhones and iPods.

Before that, there was the publication of a curious book titled The Lifespan of a Fact, which is essentially the email correspondence between John D’Agata, the author of a piece of “creative nonfiction” about Las Vegas, and Jim Fingal, who was given the task of fact-checking D’Agata’s essay by the literary magazine that was going to publish it.

After he was outed, Daisey wavered between contrition and defiance, sometimes defending his fabrications as part of some higher dramatic truth—even though he presented his monologue as the more run-of-the-mill variety of truth, the kind you could actually believe.

D’Agata, judging from a hilariously scathing review of The Lifespan of a Fact in the New York Times Book Review, had no qualms whatever about his “creativity” with the facts. Just to take a random minor example, when confronted with the fact that there were 31 licensed strip clubs in Las Vegas rather than 34, as his essay would have it, D’Agata responded that he’d arrived at the alternate number “because the rhythm of ‘34’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ’31.’” (Who is this guy D’Agata, you may ask? The answer is chilling: He teaches in the most prestigious graduate creative writing program in the country, at the University of Iowa.)

But my point here is that many people instinctively recoil at the notion of something being labeled “nonfiction” when, in fact, it contains elements that are distorted, exaggerated, or flat-out invented. I count myself as one of those people.

But what about the opposite situation? What about something that’s labeled “fiction” but in fact contains some elements that are actually true? Is there anything wrong with that?

I think most of us would say “no,” and with good reason: many, if not most, novels and short stories incorporate their authors’ own experiences or observations of other people’s experiences. In fact, if writers of fiction were forbidden from incorporating elements taken from real life—even authors of science fiction—they’d probably have to just throw in the towel.

I’ve written two novels that were inspired by some version of reality: one historical, based on the lives of real people who lived over 200 years ago; and the other contemporary, based in part on an experience I myself lived through.

Of the two, the historical novel contains far more “fact.” Much of it consists of actual 18th-century letters and other documents, and I was consciously striving to recreate, with the help of my imagination, the lives of real people who were long gone. By contrast, when I wrote the contemporary novel, I was consciously striving to get away from the facts as I knew them, to invent characters who might have had some roots in the reality I knew at first hand but who were, ultimately, independent creations.

And yet—perhaps not surprisingly—it’s the contemporary novel that has caused the greater stir, prompting accusations that it’s a thinly veiled, and some even say defamatory, depiction of real people.

I don’t want to get into defending myself against these accusations here (I’ve already done that—see, for example, my previous blog post). But it did occur to me—as I was listening to the excruciating interview conducted with Mike Daisey by Ira Glass, the host of “This American Life,” a radio show that had aired his monologue—that I’m the obverse of the author who’s trying to prove that his nonfiction is really, in some sense, true. I’m the novelist who’s trying to prove that her fiction is invented. And in some ways, I have the more difficult task.

You can’t really fact-check a novel. Well, I suppose you could try. William Safire included some 50 pages of notes at the end of his novel Scandalmonger, set in the 18th century and based on the lives of real people. And I did something along those lines in my own historical novel, A More Obedient Wife: I put all the letters and other historical documents that I incorporated into the novel (and interspersed with fictional diary entries) in italics, so that readers who were interested could discern the facts, at least to some extent, by paying attention to the typeface.

But I’ve found that most readers of A More Obedient Wife don’t keep track of what’s in italics and what isn’t. And actually, I think that’s a good sign. They get so caught up in the story that they don’t stop to wonder what’s factual and what’s invented. And the bottom line is that the book is essentially fiction, despite the historically documentable skeleton. By using my imagination to try to bring these long-dead people to life, I’ve made them into new creatures, characters of my own invention.

Trying to separate “fact” from “fiction” in a contemporary novel is even more fruitless. I would compare it to presenting someone with a loaf of bread and asking them to separate, say, the yeast that went into it from the flour, or the flour from the water. You can’t do it. You may have started with certain identifiable ingredients (one part “fact,” perhaps, to five parts invention), but by the time you’re done you have a completely different animal.

I’ve written both nonfiction and fiction, and I think I know the difference. Each of them presents its own set of challenges. Part of the challenge of writing nonfiction is taking the set of facts you’re given, or that you can observe, and creating something meaningful. It’s hard, painstaking work, and I remember thinking, as I was waiting and hoping for a “scene” to emerge from the randomness of the actual life of some person I was following around, that it would be a lot easier to just make it up.

When I did start to make it up, I discovered that it wasn’t all that easy. The challenge of writing fiction is different: you don’t have a given set of facts, you have the whole uncabined universe of your imagination, and the difficulty is figuring out which of your nearly infinite inventions are worthy of inclusion in your narrative. And you don’t have the natural advantage of the nonfiction writer, which is the legitimacy you get from labeling your story as “true.” You actually have to make your reader believe what you’re telling her.

That may be one reason I’m drawn to historical fiction based on real people’s lives: because I’m working within the outlines of what I can find out about them, my uncomfortably infinite choices are narrowed, and I feel some assurance that what I’m writing is believable. It’s also one reason I get so riled by writers whose “nonfiction” turns out to contain deliberate invention: they get an unfair boost by tweaking the facts so they can have it both ways. They’re not constrained by what they’re able to observe and verify, the way I was. If the “right” scene doesn’t happen, or if the right facts don’t come to hand, they do just make it up. And they don’t have to make it convincing, because it comes labeled as nonfiction.

It’s fairly easy for readers to see the problem with inserting fiction into what’s supposed to be a factual narrative. We’ve all had to write research papers in school, or other nonfiction productions, and we have an instinctive sense that you’re not supposed to just insert lies (even if some of us may have succumbed to the temptation to do so).

But not that many readers have written fiction. It’s a mysterious process, even to those of us who do it, so maybe it’s understandable that those who haven’t done it sometimes don’t quite get it. They may see a character who reminds them of someone they know and assume that—despite the obvious inventions of the plot—the author’s portrayal of that character reveals what she really thinks of that real-life person.

I can’t speak for other writers—and there’s no way for me to prove this, in the way that Jim Fingal proved that John D’Agata had the wrong number of licensed strip clubs in Las Vegas—but I can say that wherever my characters originate, by the time they hit the page they’re their own independent beings, baked in the oven of my imagination.

 

Yesterday’s News

Posted on by

The common wisdom about newspapers is that old ones are good primarily for wrapping fish. (Obviously, this wisdom dates from the pre-Internet era. Just try wrapping a fish in a laptop.) But I’ve found that old newspapers–at least, really old ones–are good for lots of other things as well.

Right now I’m trying to write a novel that’s set in Baltimore in 1807. Some of my characters are based on real people who lived in Baltimore at the time, and who sometimes got their names mentioned in the paper. It’s a thrill to come across them in the Baltimore Federal Gazette or American and Commercial Daily Advertiser, even more of a thrill than it is to come across the names of people I know in the paper today. Not only are the newspaper mentions independent corroboration that these people really existed 200 years ago (although I have plenty of other evidence for that), they’re also clues to who they were and how they were perceived, clues for which I’m desperately hungry.

Beyond that, old newspapers, like old letters, are invaluable windows into another era, unmediated by scholarly interpretation or contemporary filter. Sometimes the most fascinating items are the ones that readers of the time must have taken for granted but strike us as bizarre. For instance, almost every issue of the Baltimore papers seems to contain at least one notice that stray cows have appeared on someone’s property. This is a problem that rarely gets mentioned in the history books, but it was obviously of some concern at the time, even in the environs of what was then the country’s third largest city.

More troubling are the notices about stray people. Ads offering rewards for runaway slaves are frequent, and the descriptions–at least to our modern eyes–can make these people come alive as human beings at the same time that they’re being advertised as lost (or escaped) property. Here’s one from July of 1807:

“FIFTEEN DOLLARS REWARD

Ran off from the subscriber’s farm … a NEGRO MAN, named ANTHONY, about 24 years old, about five feet nine or ten inches high, pretty well made, and very black. The little finger of one of his hands has a scar on it, occasioned by a burn, and his buttocks has been scalded in a remarkable manner; he has lost one of his upper fore teeth, and has three small scars on the back of his neck, occasioned by cupping. He had on and took with him a new Osnaburg shirt and trowsers, a brown Flushing over jacket, one calico waistcoat, one old blue half-thick do. [i.e., ditto], a new wool hat, and old shoes: he has taken a reap hook with him, and it is probable that he will change his name, and try to pass as a free man, and want employ as a reaper. …”

As a 21st-century reader, I can’t help but wonder how Anthony’s buttocks got scalded “in a remarkable manner,” and what sort of treatment awaited him if he got caught and sent back to his owner. But did such thoughts cross the mind of most early 19th-century readers? I doubt it.

Occasionally you’ll find an ad offering slaves for sale, like the one I came across offering “A Negro woman and her Child, one year old–the price 250 dollars, and not to leave the state.” (This last provision may have been a sign of that the owner was trying to keep the woman and her child within visiting distance of the father–but of course, there were parts of Maryland that wouldn’t have been particularly accessible to a slave in or near Baltimore, so perhaps not.) And then there are the ones that advertise Negroes who “claim” they’re free but who are being held in jail pending proof–which must have been difficult for many of them to provide.

Not all these notices concern Negroes or slaves. Some offer rewards for the return of indentured servants, many of whom were presumably white. I came across one that seemed distinctly half-hearted: it offered a reward of only one cent for the return of an indentured young woman, who was apparently not much of a worker. Then there was the sad notice addressed “To the Parents of a certain Child, called MARIAH, that has been left with me for better than thirteen months past, and the parents of this child have but twice come forward to render any subsistence for the infant.” The woman who posted the ad threatened to send the child to the poor house unless the parents coughed up some support.

All these notices conjure up the reality of a harsher world than our own, a world where human beings were bought and sold and captured much like cattle, who could apparently be seen roaming the outskirts of the city, and where some parents were either unable or unwilling to protect their children from the horrors of the poor house.

Old newspapers also tell us about what people thought was important at the time, which doesn’t always correspond with what posterity has deemed worthy of attention. In the summer of 1807, newspapers were preoccupied with speculation about whether war with the British was imminent, because of a now mostly forgotten incident in the Chesapeake Bay in June in which an American ship was fired upon by a British one. We now know that war wouldn’t come for another five years, but the Baltimoreans of 1807 were busy forming regiments and buying uniforms and arms (soldiers had to provide their own). The papers were full of notices calling for volunteers to attend meetings in taverns to elect officers, or to practice their drills on open spaces around the city.

In the midst of all this preparation for war, though, the newspapers make it clear that life went on. There are ads for fireworks displays on July 4th–which seem far more elaborate than the ones we see now, with one boasting a depiction of Don Quixote battling the windmill, as well as “The Bombardment of Tripoli.” Acrobats were performing, pleasure boats were plying the Baltimore Harbor, and a male and a female tiger were being displayed for 25 cents in a cage that readers were assured was quite secure.

All of these things are valuable grist for my novelist’s mill: I’ve just written a chapter that takes place at that 4th of July fireworks display, and in my next a character may well pass a volunteer regiment drilling on the green. Those tigers and acrobats and pleasure boats might even show up at some point.

And then there are, as I mentioned before, the items that are thrillingly relevant to the real people I’m trying to write about: a skeptical summary of  a controversial theory of the cause of disease put forward by one of my characters, a doctor; a notice that the magazine another character writes for has been sold; an ad placed by a third character–an artist–for his “infallible” toothache cure. Discovering each of these is like uncovering a small, rough gemstone, which I need to figure out how to polish and add to my narrative so that it fits in with the plot I’ve created.

It’s not always easy. For one thing, reality isn’t always as believable as fiction. A case in point is a scene in last week’s season premiere of “Mad Men,” which featured a group of black protesters who invade the front office of a Madison Avenue ad agency after they’ve been pelted with water bombs that seem to have come from the agency’s windows. “And they call us savages,” one of the protesters says in disgust.

Some critics found the scene, and particularly that line, wooden and unbelievable. I have to admit the same thoughts crossed my mind as I watched it. It turns out, though, that the incident really happened, and the line was really uttered–according to a story in a recent issue of the New York Times, a researcher for the show came across a Times story from May 1966 that laid out the whole incident.

Doesn’t matter, said the critics. If it doesn’t ring true, the writers of “Mad Men” shouldn’t have included it. I can understand their point of view. But if I’d been Matthew Weiner, the creator of the show, I don’t think I could have resisted putting it in either.

 

 

A Vengeful Screed?

Posted on by

I’m about to do something that no author should ever do: respond to a negative review.

Generally speaking, I abide by the rule that one should take one’s lumps in silence. It’s never easy to hear criticism of your writing, but if you’re going to make it as a writer it’s something you have to get used to. And I have. Nor am I so naïve as to think that everyone who reads The Mother Daughter Show will love it. There are very few books, if any, that are universally beloved. Usually, when I read a review by someone who didn’t like the book I remind myself of all the people who did like it, and I move on.

But this review—an Amazon reader review—is harder to brush off. The reviewer didn’t just attack my writing, she attacked me as a person. And, as I’ll explain in a moment, she did an injustice to the very people she was trying to defend.

The review, headed “A Vengeful Screed, Not a Satire,” takes issue with my novel because, according to the reviewer, “it’s based on TRUE EVENTS that are thinly veiled as satire and that defame three real-life mothers who dared to reign [sic] in the author-Broadway wannabe from taking over a sweet tradition.”

The reviewer admits in the review that she has no first-hand knowledge of these “TRUE EVENTS.” As far as I can make out, she’s a friend of someone who was involved in the real Mother-Daughter Show and who feels that she, or someone she knows, has been portrayed in the novel in a less than flattering light.

It’s hard to know where to begin. First of all, as I’ve said repeatedly, while the book was inspired by a real experience, it is—and I’m going to put this in all caps—FICTION. Yes, a few things that are in the book did happen, but huge amounts of it came from my imagination.

This is especially true of the characters. While the three main characters fill roles vis-a-vis the fictional show that were, more or less, filled by real women involved in the real show—the Writer, the Organizer, the Keeper of the Peace—these characters are creatures of my own invention. I had no interest in turning the real women in the show into fictional characters, and even if I had, I couldn’t have done it. I simply didn’t know them well enough to write about them in the kind of detail a novelist needs to command if she’s going to make her characters come alive.

And even if you were to accept the reviewer’s claim that my characters somehow “are” real people, they’re actually not that bad. Sure, they’re flawed—all literary characters need flaws, especially the ones in a comic novel—but to me they’re fundamentally sympathetic, and I know that many readers perceive them that way as well. I didn’t want to write a story that had villains in it. When my characters behave less than admirably, as all of them do on occasion, I wanted readers to understand their motivations and be able to imagine themselves behaving similarly. Yes, the book is a satire, but it’s a gentle one.

Not to mention that if you accept the reviewer’s logic, one of the women I’m “defaming” is actually myself, since one of the characters plays a role parallel to the one I played in the real show.

As for the reviewer’s contention that I was a “Broadway wannabe” who tried to “take over” the show, that one is actually kind of amusing—or would be, in a different context. Suffice it to say that I had no such ambitions.

And as for the idea that the show was a “sweet tradition”—well, some people feel that way, I’m sure. But I’ve spoken to quite a few women who, over the years, had a less than sweet experience. I’ve met women who told me they would go home and cry after the planning meetings because the other mothers were so cruel to them. I’ve met women who were in this show 25 years ago and still find the experience too painful to talk about. The year I was involved in the show, I’m sure there were women on the periphery who thought it was all very sweet, but anyone who knew what was really going on was well aware there were serious problems.

Is it worth putting some women through such unpleasantness year after year so that other women can continue what is, from their perspective, a sweet tradition? I don’t think so. And apparently neither does the school, since as of this year they’ve abolished the show. (Some people think the school took that action because of my book, and credit or blame me accordingly—one Mother-Daughter Show veteran told me I’d performed a “public service.” But I’m confident the school didn’t need me to point out that the tradition had gotten out of hand.)

Of course, most likely none of what I’ve just said will make any difference to the reviewer or others who share her point of view. But I do feel that in one respect the reviewer got so carried away by her strong feelings that she unintentionally injured the very people she was trying to defend. In her zeal to denounce me, she opened the door for readers to take everything in the novel as literal truth—including, for example, the philandering husband I invented for one character and the bulimic daughter I invented for another. I suppose it’s possible that the characters’ real-life counterparts have such family members, but if they do, it’s a total coincidence. And either way, I can’t understand why anyone would want to give the public the impression that these things are true—especially someone who considers herself a friend of the people involved.

I didn’t set out to write a “vengeful screed,” but if I’m totally honest, I have to admit that I was upset when I began writing the book three years ago—not because my song lyrics had been rejected, as the reviewer would have it, but because of the cruel and sometimes underhanded way people were interacting with each other. But as I wrote and rewrote the manuscript, which ultimately went through about thirteen drafts and underwent substantial changes, my own emotions and the facts of the real-life show receded. My focus was simply on writing a decent novel. And although it wasn’t always easy to do all that rewriting, I’m very glad I did. Reflecting and revising not only makes for better writing, it also minimizes the chances that the final product will end up sounding like—well, like a vengeful screed.

That’s why I waited 24 hours after composing this blog post, during which I turned it over in my mind quite a bit. Then I read it again and made some changes before posting it. I can only wonder if the Amazon reviewer did the same.

Write What You Don’t Know

Posted on by

Right now I’m in the midst of sorting through a bunch of short stories I’ve agreed to help judge for a local magazine’s short fiction contest. As I read, I’m often reminded of a question I got from a member of the audience at Politics & Prose, my invaluable neighborhood independent bookstore, where I discussed The Mother Daughter Show last month.

“How did you manage to write fiction about something based on your own experience?” a woman—herself a writer—asked. She explained that whenever she’s tried to do that, the result has been unsatisfying.

I knew just what she meant. When I first started writing fiction (short stories, inevitably, since that’s what almost everyone starts with), I had the same problem. Something interesting, or traumatic, would happen in my life, and I would think: great material for a short story! But what I wrote always ended up sounding more like an essay.

Judging from the submissions to the short fiction contest, a lot of aspiring writers out there have the same idea I did. I can sniff out pretty easily which of these stories are thinly veiled, or even not so thinly veiled, versions of Something That Really Happened. Some of them might have worked pretty well as essays, but they just don’t make it as short stories.

Why? It’s hard to sum it up in a few words, and of course it varies in the details, but for one thing, the narrator or main character—the one whose point of view we get—is often something of a cipher. Or a noble or virtuous person pitted against others who are obviously in the wrong.

We all have trouble seeing ourselves objectively, portraying ourselves as three-dimensional people with quirks and flaws. But for fictional characters to come to life, they need those quirks and flaws. The reader needs to see them whole, and if the writer is too identified with a character—or can’t really separate that “character” from herself—she won’t be able to create a portrait that comes alive. (That’s not to say the “character” of the narrator is unimportant in an essay. It is, and even when we’re writing as ourselves, we have multiple selves to choose from. But in my view, it’s not as important in an essay as it is in a short story.)

Then there’s the matter of plot. I’ve always found creating a plot for a short story kind of challenging, myself—you don’t have much time to develop something, so you have to know that you’re not biting off more than the story can handle. But many of these Something That Really Happened stories don’t bite off enough. They’re more like vignettes, or slices of life. Or what happens is predictable: boy meets girl, for instance, and either loses her or gets her. Obviously, some of the world’s greatest stories have that plot as their basis, but it’s a question of what the author does with that skeletal outline that makes the story great.

When you start out with Something That Really Happened, it can be hard to wean yourself from that Something. And sometimes, for the sake of the story, you need to. The fact is, life rarely hands you a good plot.

So how did I manage to write what I hope is a successful novel based on Something That Really Happened? As I told my questioner at Politics & Prose, first I had to write about something removed from my own experience—something that couldn’t possibly have happened to me. The first time I tried that, I wrote a short story based on something that had happened to my father when he was a child—but something that I knew little about and, since my father had already died, I couldn’t ask him about directly. In other words, I forced myself to make stuff up. And to get myself even further removed from reality, I set the story not in the 1930’s, when it would have taken place, but in the 1960’s. I’m not saying I hit it out of the park, but that story was the first fiction I ever got published.

I got more practice making stuff up when I set out to write my first novel. Again, I had a factual framework of sorts—a bunch of 18th-century letters I’d come across. But, again, there was no way I could figure out all the details. I had to make stuff up.

When I started writing The Mother Daughter Show, I knew I had to be careful not to let it slip into an account of Something That Really Happened. So, for instance, I deliberately made one of the characters—the one who was closest to being me—as different from me as I could. I made her Italian Catholic instead of Jewish, gave her long dark hair instead of short red hair, gave her three kids instead of two. Those might seem like trivial things, but they helped to establish a separation between her and me. I also gave her a background in advertising instead of law, but later on—for purposes of the plot—I had to make her a former lawyer like myself. Still, while she does say and think things that I’ve said and thought, she’s definitely not me. (The other characters say and think a few things that come from me, too.)

Even so, I found out relatively late in the writing process that I needed to do more. In coming up with a plot, I had hewn too closely to Stuff That Really Happened. While the mechanics of a group of mothers planning a musical revue may have been fascinating to me, and perhaps to a few others who were involved, other readers found the accounts of meetings and rehearsals tedious. Other things needed to happen—things I had to completely make up. Shoehorning a new plot into an existing one wasn’t easy, but it had to be done.

As with just about everything in writing, none of this is set in stone. Maybe you’re one of the rare people who’ve had an experience that will make an amazing short story—or even a novel—with hardly a tweak. (By the same token, merely making stuff up doesn’t guarantee that you’ll end up with successful fiction—there’s a lot more involved!) But in general, my advice to a beginning writer who wants to turn his or her life into fiction comes down to the opposite of “write what you know.” First, write what you don’t know.

Who Are You Calling “Catty”?

Posted on by

The other evening I visited a book group that had read The Mother Daughter Show—something I’m always happy to do. After the usual preliminaries, one of the women (as usual, all the members were women) began a comment by saying, “I thought your book was really well written. I mean really, really well written.”

I thanked her, but something about her tone alerted me to the probability that there was a “but” coming. And there was.

“But I had a hard time with all the cattiness.”

I felt a wave of disappointment. Not because she had an objection to the book—I understand that not every reader is going to love everything about my book. But in my own mind, my characters aren’t catty. They may not always act admirably, but I’ve tried to provide understandable motivations for their actions, and my hope is that readers will sympathize with them while recognizing their flaws. “Catty” just doesn’t sound like an adjective you’d apply to someone you found sympathetic.

I murmured some response, but later I found myself mulling over the remark. I wished I’d asked the woman to be more specific—not just in pinpointing what behavior by my characters she’d found catty, but also what she meant by the word.

It seems to me it’s an adjective that’s applied exclusively to conflicts between women. But do we use it to describe all conflicts between women, maybe because we’re uncomfortable with the very idea of women fighting? Or do we mean a certain kind of behavior? Do we ever describe men as being catty? (Let’s be clear here: I mean heterosexual men.) And are there any adjectives that we use specifically to describe conflicts between men?

All of these questions began swirling around in my brain. Not being able to track down the woman who made the “cattiness” remark, I added the questions I’ve posed above to the Reading Guide on my website. Maybe they’ll come up at the next book group I visit.

I also looked up “catty” in the dictionary, and I was surprised to find that there was no gender reference. The definitions were given as “1. Subtly cruel or malicious; spiteful,” and “2. Catlike; stealthy.” As a cat lover, I can go with “stealthy,” but I do feel I should register an objection, on behalf of the feline population, to the linkage of “cat” and the first definition, which of course is the more common usage. I’ve seen my three cats go after each other, and there’s nothing subtle about it—or particularly cruel or spiteful, for that matter. They just fight. Of course, they’re all boys. And somehow, we do seem to associate the word “cat” with women. Think “catfight.” Or “cathouse.”

So let’s get back to the gender angle. Clearly, the woman at the book group meant something specific to women. The question is, what?

I don’t think women have any monopoly on cruelty, spite, or malice. I’m inclined to focus on the word “subtle.” Actually, I’m inclined to more or less junk the dictionary definition and offer one of my own: to me, “catty” connotes behavior that is two-faced or insidious. For instance, when someone turns around and begins to tear into an ostensible friend as soon as she (or possibly he) leaves the room. My hunch is that this is what a lot of people mean, and that they think of women as being far more likely to engage in such behavior than men. (There’s historical precedent for this. Today, while doing research for a historical novel, I came across this passage in a magazine article from 1807: “As to the belles, when any opportunity is given to them to declare their sentiments, they will commence a brisk cannonading against the dress, reputation, and awkward behavior of others, and tear in pieces without mercy the whole circle of their dearest friends.”)

Generalizations based on gender are of course fraught with risk. Neither women nor men are monolithic groups. But, admitting that my observations are totally unscientific, I have noticed some differences between the way males and females engage in conflict.

When my son was perhaps twelve, I overheard him and his friends playing video games in the basement. They were loudly and continuously berating each other, calling each other “stupid idiots” and similar epithets. I raced upstairs to alert my husband, and asked him whether we shouldn’t intervene. “That’s just the way boys talk to each other,” he shrugged.

On the other hand, when my daughter was about ten, she got a letter from two supposed friends of hers, laden with all sorts of obscure verbiage. They seemed to be telling her they didn’t want to be friends with her any more, but it was impossible to figure out why.

I don’t want to place too much weight on these two incidents, but it does strike me that women tend to be more indirect in their confrontations. For instance, in The Mother Daughter Show, some women who object to a script another woman has written decide to simply replace it with a different version without telling her, on the grounds that it will be “kinder” not to confront her directly. And at that book group I was at the other night, a woman told a story about an annual sale at her kids’ school that was co-opted by another group of women in a similar manner. (And while I wouldn’t call the woman who made the “cattiness” remark catty, there’s no doubt she was trying to soften her criticism by being indirect.)

If in fact women do engage in these kinds of subterfuges and machinations, I would suggest that it stems from an aversion to conflict. We may say it’s “kinder” not to confront someone directly, but more likely we’re trying to be kind to ourselves. After all, when that person ultimately finds out that we’ve secretly betrayed her, she’s likely to feel worse than she would if we’d been more open about our disagreements. It’s no fun to be stabbed in the front, but there’s a reason “stabbed in the back” sounds worse.

I consider myself a pretty conflict-averse person, and yet I’ve found myself embroiled in a few unpleasant tiffs over the years—and they’ve all been with other women. But I don’t think that’s because women are more likely to have conflicts, direct or indirect (and I’ve experienced both). I think it’s because I’m more likely to interact with other women.

And there’s a reason for that. The fact is, my positive, rewarding interactions with other women have far outweighed the negative ones. My close friends are almost all women, and those friendships have helped sustain me. That’s what I prefer to focus on, and that’s what I tried to bring out in The Mother Daughter Show—that it’s not the petty differences between women that are important, but the bonds of love and friendship that persist despite those differences. If only there were a gender-specific word to describe them.

Women’s Friendships: Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them

Posted on by

Sometimes, when I’ve spent too many days more or less alone, banging away at a keyboard, the world begins to look unaccountably bleak. I’ve learned from experience what I need to do at times like that: go talk to a friend. Just a conversation—a laugh or two, maybe some commiseration, a little encouragement or moral support—lifts me out of myself and reminds me of my connection to humanity. Or at least to one other person—more often than not another woman—who’s on my wavelength.

But friendships with other women can be laced with tension as well. No matter how much we click with a friend, no matter how much we feel we share a sense of humor or a worldview, there are bound to be differences. You think you’ve found a soul-mate, and then she says or does something that leaves you baffled or angry. It can be hard to let go of that precious illusion that the two of you, down deep, were really twins.

When a reader of an early draft of my novel The Mother Daughter Show suggested that I make two of my three female characters friends, my first reaction was “no way.” I’d constructed a story in which three women, all mothers of teenage daughters in the same high school senior class, are locked in conflict over a show they’re working on together. Two of them end up despising each other. They’re polar opposites in many ways. How could they possibly start out as friends?

But my second reaction was, “Hey, wait a minute …”  Opposites sometimes attract, in friendship as in romance. Amanda could find her doubts and insecurities balanced by Susan’s confidence and optimism. And Susan could feel that Amanda’s quickness and sense of humor tease out similar, usually dormant, qualities in herself. They could feel bound by shared history and experiences, especially if their daughters have been best friends for years.

And when a falling-out arises between friends, it’s far more interesting, psychologically, than a falling-out between strangers. Disagreements over the show could merely be the catalyst for an eruption of long-standing tensions within the friendship.

I already had one ready-made source of tension: Susan was chronically, and somewhat unsuccessfully, watching her weight, while Amanda was effortlessly thin. I’ve been on both sides of that divide. I was a chubby kid, and throughout my adolescence and into my twenties I was constantly counting calories and trying to shake off five or ten pounds. Then—atypically—after I had children my metabolism seemed to change. I don’t pay too much attention to what I eat—although I’m conscious of what’s healthy—and my weight never seems to vary by more than a pound or two. So I’ve been the one greedily eyeing, while simultaneously trying to ignore, the rich dessert my companion is wolfing down. And I’ve also been the one ordering that dessert, while a friend protests, “Nothing for me, but please, you go right ahead!”

There was one other obvious opportunity for friction: one of my characters was a stay-at-home mom, and the other had a high-powered career. I’ve worked part-time since my first child was born, so again, I’ve had one foot in each camp. And it seems to me that the so-called “Mommy Wars” are largely internal. It’s not so much that mothers with careers condemn stay-at-home moms, or vice versa. It’s more that some mothers with careers feel guilty they’re not spending more time with their kids, while stay-at-home ones may feel they’ve squandered their opportunities and education. Those of us who work part-time may feel we’re not doing either job—the one at home and the one at the office—particularly well.

And all of these internal doubts and tensions can spill over into our friendships. Perhaps, like Susan, a woman with a career will envy the freedom she thinks women who stay home with their kids enjoy. And a stay-at-home mother like Amanda may secretly resent the assumption that she’s always available to pick up the childcare slack for her friend with the demanding work schedule.

Other differences can jeopardize a friendship as well. Years ago, my closest friend told me that she felt our lives had diverged too much for us to stay friends. At the time, I was married and had just given birth to my second child. My friend was childless, recently divorced, and suffering from depression. In her eyes, I suppose, I had it all, and it was just too painful to watch.

On an intellectual level, I understood. It had become hard for me to interact with her. I couldn’t tell her about the joy my children were bringing me because I didn’t want to flaunt my happiness. Nor could I complain about my sleepless nights when her problems were so much more serious.

Still, it felt like a kick in the stomach when I read her letter telling me she was cutting me off. We’d been best friends since adolescence, and losing her was like losing a part of myself. The ways in which she’d been different from me–her raunchy sense of humor, her skeptical way of looking at the world–had seeped into my consciousness. Sometimes I would hear an echo of her voice in my own, and it would only remind me of her absence.

Then one day the phone rang and it was her. Her father had died recently, she said, and it had made her realize she didn’t want to lose anyone else important to her. Could we be friends again? I hesitated only a moment. All my pent-up anger and pain dissolved, and we picked up our friendship as though only a week had passed instead of several years. In a way, the separation made our friendship stronger, because we realized how much we’d almost lost.

So it is with my characters Amanda and Susan. Eventually they come to see that their differences, and the resulting tensions, are far less important than the things that bind them. In fact, sometimes it’s those differences that make a friendship so precious. We may never be able to find our exact double, but if we’re lucky we can find something else that’s a lot more valuable: a friend.

 

 

Career Re-Entry: A Perilous Prospect

Posted on by

Finding a job these days is a daunting prospect. But imagine how much more daunting it can be if you haven’t held a job for the past ten, fifteen, even twenty years. You worry that employers will look askance at that huge hole on your resume. Your skills may have gotten rusty—or perhaps, given the rapid pace of change, obsolete. And you’re going to be competing against energetic, tech-savvy applicants half your age.

It’s a situation faced all too often by women who’ve chosen to take time off from their careers to care full-time for their kids and who later—whether by choice or necessity or both—try to get back into the workforce.

I’ve been lucky. Unsure of whether I wanted to continue my career in the law or stay home with my kids, I managed to find an interesting and fulfilling part-time job when I was pregnant with my first child. Later I turned to writing, which (in addition to being the one thing I’ve always wanted to do) gave me the ability to control my hours.

But I’ve long been interested in the difficulties faced by mothers seeking jobs after having gone cold turkey from the work world. I’ve had friends in that position, and I’m well aware I could easily have been there myself. Beyond that, it’s a national, maybe even a global problem as well as a personal one. These women have talents and skills that could benefit the economy and society. If they can’t find a way to put them to use, we all lose.

So when I saw an opportunity to weave this theme into my novel The Mother Daughter Show, I jumped at it. Years ago, when I was freelancing for a magazine, I tried to write a feature article on stay-at-home mothers who were going back to work. I interviewed a lot of interesting women, but few of them were willing to be profiled intensively and identified by name. Not only were they wary of the invasion of their privacy, they didn’t want to be seen as somehow speaking for all women in their position—feelings I could readily understand. So if I wanted to write about this phenomenon, fiction seemed like a better approach.

My character Amanda practiced law unhappily for a brief period of time, as I did. When it became economically feasible for her to stay home, she jumped at the chance. With three young kids, she barely had time to contemplate whether she would ever pick up her legal career again—and she wasn’t exactly eager to do that anyway. As her kids got older, she found the idea of looking for a job after such a long hiatus paralyzing. When the book begins, Amanda’s youngest child is about to leave for college. And she’s under serious pressure to make some money: she and her husband have just lost their nest egg in the 2008 stock market crash, and they’re facing the prospect of three college tuitions.

It’s hard enough to return to a career after a long absence when you really loved what you were doing. But trying to launch a reentry when you’re unenthusiastic about the job you left makes it way harder. Some women, like Amanda, always disliked their jobs. Others find that the years they’ve spent at home have changed what they want. One of the women I interviewed for my abortive magazine article had a successful career in the aircraft industry before quitting to stay home with her kids. When a divorce forced her to start thinking about a return to work, she discovered she no longer wanted to be a part of the macho world where she’d once thrived. Instead, she decided to get a graduate degree in school counseling.

Whether you’re returning to the same career or embarking on something new, there’s bound to be anxiety and trepidation. Thankless as the job of being a stay-at-home mom often is, at least you’re your own boss (unless, of course, you have a tyrannical toddler). And you can wear what you like. If you’re accustomed to that degree of freedom, you may not relish the prospect of taking orders from someone else (possibly someone younger than you) and squeezing yourself into constricting work clothes.

And a woman who doesn’t feel she’s exercised her intellect much lately may come to doubt her abilities. I’m not one to underestimate the psychic rewards of unpaid work—whether in the home or outside it—but there’s nothing that says “validation” like a regular paycheck. When I was doing background research for my novel, I interviewed Linda Mercurio, Director of the Lawyer Reentry Program at American University Law School, who said the women she counsels have often “lost that sense of themselves as a professional.” She reminds them that they’ve “never lost that piece of themselves,” and that what made them successful before will make them successful again.

If you do develop the confidence and have the luck to snare a job, you may find—as Amanda does—that you’ve now got two jobs: the one you’re getting paid for, and the one you were doing at home for free. Old habits die hard, and husbands and children who are used to having someone else pick up after them, cook their food, and do their laundry may be slow to adjust. And of course, you don’t stop being a mom just because you’ve gotten a job.

The Mother Daughter Show being a comic novel, I gave Amanda a happy ending: after she suffers through a stint as a temporary employee doing the dreariest of legal work, the (non-legal) job of her dreams falls into her lap. Certainly many real women—even in this difficult economy—eventually find a way to successfully reintegrate themselves into the world of work. But it should be easier than it is. Someday, I hope, society will recognize that the talents and intelligence a woman once brought to her career haven’t vanished while she’s been home with her kids. In fact, given what it takes to raise a kid, they’ve probably gotten a lot sharper.

Mothers and Daughters

Posted on by

It’s common knowledge that it’s tough to be a teenage girl, especially towards the end of high school. Cliques, boys, emotional upheavals, term papers, SATs, college essays—and the prospect, both scary and exciting, of heading off to college.

But what about the mothers? We suffer too, just watching it all. Or trying to. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the mother of a teenage girl yearns to know more than that girl wants to reveal. And the prospect of our daughters’ heading out the door—never to return to the family home in quite the same way—can make us a little crazy.

We hover, we grasp, we pry. Maybe we feel we have just a few more precious months to correct whatever has gone wrong in our relationships with our daughters—to try to achieve a closeness that the girls themselves are, simultaneously, trying to avoid. Their behavior may drive us to distraction, but the thought that we’ll soon be waking up in the morning and finding them gone has us in a panic. And through it all there’s the depressing realization that your daughter is now a lot more central to your life than you are to hers.

One reason I wrote my novel The Mother Daughter Show—which I began when my own daughter was a high school senior—was to explore the eternally fraught mother-daughter relationship. Each of my three main characters has a troubled relationship with her 18-year-old daughter. (Of course, there are also mother-daughter relationships that are happy and trouble-free, but just try writing a novel about a happy, trouble-free relationship!)

Each of these relationships is different, but none of these mothers really knows what’s going on in her teenage daughter’s life. And they’re dying to. As a mother you can understand, on an intellectual basis, that your daughter is going through a normal, healthy process of individuation, causing her to guard her privacy like a hawk. But at the same time, like my character Amanda, you sure as hell want to know who she’s talking to on the phone, or even just what happened at school that day. Teenage girls often react to such questions as though they were directly lifted from the script for the Spanish Inquisition.

Basically, they want you out of their lives. Until they want you in it. This phenomenon was neatly captured by the title of a popular book about relationships between teenagers and their parents: Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall. (Another title I love, for a book specifically about mothers and daughters: I’m Not Mad, I Just Hate You!)

Of course there’s also the “cool mom” model: mothers who pride themselves on their close relationships with their daughters. Their daughters tell them everything, and they share all the same likes and dislikes—or so they think. Maybe they’re right, and maybe I’m jealous of them. Or maybe I just needed a plot twist. But I decided to have my “cool mom” character, Susan, turn out to be the most clueless of them all: to her surprise, she discovers that her daughter has an eating disorder, and it seems like half the school knows about it.

For many parents it feels natural to assume, as Susan does, that your child is just like you, especially if you’re the mother of a daughter. She looks like me, a mother may think. She talks like me. She’s going through many of the same experiences. So she must be me, only younger! As my daughter would say, “False.”

Even if you come to realize that your daughter really isn’t you, you still want her to like you. And that can be a problem if, like my character Barb, you have a daughter who is constantly testing the limits and getting into trouble. For many of us baby-boomers, our own parents were more authoritarian, or at least more distant. But, maybe because we were young in the 1960s, it’s hard for us to see ourselves as authority figures. Ideally, we’d like to be our kids’ friends, even if they have no interest in being friends with us.  But at some point, difficult as it may be, almost all parents—mothers included—are going to have to play the heavy.

One thing I realized when I was planning to write The Mother Daughter Show is that maternal relationships don’t arise in a vacuum. The way we interact with our daughters has a lot to do with how our own mothers treated us, whether we like it or not. And so each of my main characters also has a mother of her own, with whom she has—you guessed it—a troubled relationship.

I’ve known some women whose relationships with their mothers were so toxic that they shied away from the idea of having children at all, fearful they’d be doomed to inflict on another generation what they suffered themselves. Some mothers are at the opposite extreme, eager to replicate their own happy relationships. Most of us, I suspect, are somewhere in the middle, hoping to keep the good stuff but do better in areas where we feel our mothers fell short. But unconsciously, we may find ourselves repeating their mistakes too, listening in horror to our own voices as we utter the same words that once made us cringe.

Maybe, like Amanda, we shrank from what we perceived as our own mothers’ emotional neediness, but then find ourselves feeling just as needy with our daughters. Maybe, like Susan, we’re determined not to be manipulative, but find it impossible to resist the impulse to exert control. Or maybe, like Barb, we strive to avoid the hypercriticism that made us resent our own mothers, but find that our daughters resent us nonetheless.

For all their conflicts, the mothers and daughters in The Mother-Daughter Show—to a greater or lesser degree—ultimately come to a point of mutual sympathy and understanding. You might say that’s the kind of happy ending possible only in a comic novel. But it’s possible in life too, although maybe not until the teenage years are over. Someday, I hope, my daughter will have a daughter herself. And if there’s any experience that can induce a woman to feel some sympathy for her mother, it’s having a teenage daughter of her own.

Downtown Abbey and the Classless Society

Posted on by

There aren’t that many cultural phenomena that transcend generations these days, but one of them has recently arrived in the form of a veddy British period piece called “Downton Abbey.” As everyone reading this probably already knows, the PBS series traces the fortunes of a wealthy, titled family—and their below-stairs domestic servants—before and during the cataclysm of World War I.

My husband and I found ourselves glued to it during its first season. Now my twenty-something son and daughter have discovered “Downton Abbey” and appear to be equally mesmerized—just the way my mother and I were both enthralled by the remarkably similar British series “Upstairs, Downstairs,” shown on PBS back in the 70’s. (Of course these days, thanks to the miracle of time-shifting, we don’t all have to watch “Downton Abbey” at the same time. My son and daughter watched the first season only recently, courtesy of Netflix, and my husband and I didn’t get around to watching Sunday night’s season premiere, which we had recorded, until Monday night. My daughter, who had already seen it, joined us for the last 20 minutes and helpfully provided dialogue a split second before it was voiced by the characters. She, in turn, had watched the premiere with a couple of friends who had already seen the entire second season, which has already been broadcast in Great Britain, on the Internet.)

I can’t help but wonder why so many of us Americans are fascinated by the spectacle of the dying British class system (it’s not just me and my family, of course—guests at the dinner party my husband and I attended Sunday night were clearing out before 9:00 so as not to miss the show). This week’s New Yorker quotes the American actress Elizabeth McGovern, who portrays the American-born Countess of Grantham, explaining it this way: “We are so similar and yet so profoundly different. In England, you are always having to read the signs. No one says exactly what they mean.”

True enough, but I wonder if there’s more to it than that. In a way, I think part of what fascinates us Americans about the series is what’s more out in the open—specifically, the way class is treated so matter-of-factly. Everyone knows his or her place, and even the servants are vigilant about policing class lines (at least some of them are). People may cross the boundaries, and they seem to be doing it more frequently under the pressures of war, but at least it’s clear where the boundaries are.

Meanwhile in this country, we go to great lengths to deny that class exists at all. Virtually all Americans think they belong to the middle class—a 2006 Gallup poll found that 1% of Americans identified themselves as upper class, and 6% as lower class, despite the fact that at the time 12.3% of Americans were living below the federal poverty level. And Republican Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum recently denied that there were any classes in the United States at all.

And yet just a few days before he said that, the New York Times reported that there’s actually less economic mobility in the United States than in Canada and Western Europe—including that bastion of class oppression, Great Britain. Basically that means that if you’re born poor in the United States, it’s going to be harder for you to move out of that status here than it is in the land of Downton Abbey. (And yes, the British class system isn’t what it used to be, but there’s still a franker acknowledgment of the existence of class than there is here.)

Mr. Santorum may try to distinguish between income and class (he’s quoted in that Times article as saying that movement “up into the middle income is actually greater, the mobility in Europe, than it is in America,” so at least he acknowledges that much). But when what you’re talking about is multi-generational poverty—and the relative abundance of that in this country is apparently the reason we have less mobility—it’s really a distinction without much of a difference. Generations of low income produce a certain kind of culture, just as generations of high income do.

Anyone who thinks we live in a classless society just has to take a look at my hometown, Washington, D.C. Things aren’t quite as stratified here as they used to be, partly thanks to gentrification—which, before it pushes out low-income residents often produces an interesting mix of people within a given neighborhood. But you’d be hard pressed to find many residents of the Upper Northwest quadrant of  D.C. whose income is below the poverty line, while other areas (specifically Wards Seven and Eight) have plenty of people in that category. (I had to mention the Upper Northwest, since that’s ostensibly the subject of this blog!)

Maybe we’re so fascinated by the frank acknowledgment of class distinctions in “Downton Abbey” because it’s a relief not to have to pretend such things don’t exist. It’s understandable that some Americans feel an impulse to deny that there are classes in this country. After all, our founding was premised on a rejection of titles and aristocracy and everything that went with them (although believe me, few if any of the Founders would have gone so far as to reject the idea of class). And a classless society is surely a laudable goal. But let’s not confuse aspirations with reality.

Meanwhile, we can all tune in to “Downton Abbey” and feel smugly superior to these people with their antiquated but somehow charming notions of where they all rank in the social scale, whether we really are superior or not.